


Alone in the Crypts

by devilinthedetails



Category: PIERCE Tamora - Works, Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Family, Gen, Grief, Loss, Mourning, references to death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-12
Updated: 2019-04-12
Packaged: 2020-01-12 00:00:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18434840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devilinthedetails/pseuds/devilinthedetails
Summary: Gareth mourns his sister alone in the crypts.





	Alone in the Crypts

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Individual Character Week Event for the Goldenlake Free for All.

Alone in the Crypts

Alone Gareth stood shadowing his sister’s tomb like the Black God in the dark cold of the Conte crypts. Roanna and Gary (who had become shockingly somber in recent months) had each offered separately to accompany him, but he had refused both of them. He needed to be alone in his grief. He couldn’t let them see how weak he was–how unable he was to protect them just as he had failed to protect Lianne from the diabolical plotting of a treasonous nephew. He had loved his sister as much as any brother had ever loved a sister but he hadn’t been able to save her–not from the pain of miscarriages and stillbirths and certainly not from the inescapable finality of death–and that cut him to the core more sharply than a sword.

Lianne, he recalled with a terrible wrench of his heart as the chill of the crypts settled deeply into his bones that were no longer young, had always hated the cold and the dark as much as she had loved the warmth and the light. Remembering stolen childhood moments that he thought he had forgotten years ago, he thought of how as a little girl she would cling to his hand before she would fall asleep so she would know he was there for her if she needed him. She had been so innocent then–had always been so innocent–that it was unfathomable that even someone as vile as Roger would seek to harm her. Brushing his fingers against the marble face of her tomb, he reflected on how impossible it was that she who had been beautiful then was now she was sleeping alone in the dark, cold Conte crypts. 

She shouldn’t have been buried in the Conte crypts, he thought suddenly, though every Naxen who had married a Conte had been. She should have been laid to rest in the warm, sunny fields of Naxen where the golden flowers that grew only in Naxen she had loved so much could blossom over her grave. 

He lit a stick of incense so at least she would no longer be in the dark and prayed to the Black God that its scent and warmth would reach her in the Peaceful Realms. He hoped it would remind her of how she had darted through fields of golden flowers, scooping them to her nose for sniffing, and that the same flowers somehow bloomed in the Peaceful Realms so he could one day watch her run through fields of them again. Then he returned to the light and warmth of the palace and his family because he knew beyond a shadow of doubt that was what Lianne wanted for him–what she had and would always want for him. He would carry her light and warmth in his heart and in his soul forever. He would never forget her or the warmth and the light she had embodied even as he went on living in the warmth and the light for both of them.


End file.
